


Morriña

by KareliaSweet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Longing, M/M, Memory Palace, Pining, Rebuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 21:58:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5349977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KareliaSweet/pseuds/KareliaSweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will tries to rebuild his life. A hard thing to do when your memory palace shares so many rooms with the man you're trying to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morriña

**Author's Note:**

> **morriña**  
>     1. longing; nostalgia; homesickness  
> From Galician _morriña_ , ultimately from a form of Latin mori (“ _to die_ ”).

Sound returns after fifty-three minutes.

As the ringing recedes, Hannibal hears the echo of his heartbeat thudding heavy and painful. It beats in funereal tempo with the slow wetness crawling across his cheeks.

There is no point in wiping it away. He will wear his tears as a mourning shroud, let them fall and bleed from him until he is nothing but ash and vapour.

His mind casts the line back, to the last words Alana had said before she left.

“Oh by the way,” she tossed over a tailored shoulder, “Will Graham got married.”

Casual, oh so casual, and almost bright with the aftertaste of her bitter joy.

The door had closed behind her, and with it a hallway of rooms slammed shut in unison.

Will Graham. Married.

Happy, presumably.

Happy.

Without him.

Hannibal breathes, each inhalation a carefully hooked knife wound that draws jagged across his chest. Each exhalation forcefully sews him shut again, and every new breath forms a deeper scar.

He does not eat for three days, only resurfacing from near-catatonia when he is patiently told that they will not hesitate to install a feeding tube.

So he eats. He drinks. He reads, he draws, he sighs and waits for the pain to let up, just for a moment.

It doesn’t. It never will.

He tries to retreat, but every room in his memory palace is abandoned, windows boarded up, doors rusted shut. When he pries his way inside, everything is smeared with decay. Furniture withers under molding dust covers, beams crack and splinter, water seeps through the warping floorboards.

He tries to visit Wolf Trap, but the house has split in two, sawed open wide with black smoke seeping from its maw.

A warning.  _Do not come here again_.

He tries to picture Will's hands, but their image slips from him like water. He sees instead the hand of a skeleton, cobwebbed and yellowed, a bright silver ring loosely circling the fourth finger. When he reaches for the hand it crumbles and the ring drops to the floor with a clank. He picks it up and it is heavy, so very heavy that it pulls him to his knees.

He weeps. He wonders if there was ever a time when he was not weeping.

Little concern is expressed for his mental decline. The sour taste of schadenfreude hangs in the air, especially thick around the mouth of Frederick Chilton.

Hannibal makes a note in the still-working recesses of his mind that if he ever escapes this he will write wrath upon that insufferable smirking mouth.

Months pass. The pain does not lessen, but he grows accustomed enough to tolerate it. Breathing still aches but the knife no longer cuts, the scar tissue too thick and gnarled to be broken. He directs his sorrow inward, keeps himself impassive, lets his mask re-form. His eyes hood back to implacable darkness, he re-learns how to wield the blade of his smile. He returns to making awful jokes to the staff, watches their faces twitch in poorly concealed horror.

The hurt does not heal, but it becomes easier to control.

He sets to work refurbishing his memory palace, blowing the dust from shelves gone grey with disuse. He picks the vines and moss from the gates of his home, plants fresh herbs in his garden. He finds the gramophone in his study and sets the needle to some Puccini as he begins rebuilding the room he cherishes the most. He smooths his hand over each brick, gently adjusts the hue of each fading colour, arranges the rise and fall of light and shadow until the balance makes his eyes shine. When it is ready, he lights each candle with care, sets the chairs in neat, orderly rows, and spreads the sunlight in an effortless golden fan. Then he sits before the altar of the Norman Chapel and closes his eyes.

He waits.

He will come.

Eventually, he will come.

-x-

Will Graham is happy.

The feeling is unsettling to say the least.

He had expected Molly to say no when he first asked her to dinner. Who in their right mind would take on a man with baggage his size (only half of which she knew the extent of): a backwards, backwoods grump of a man nearing forty with a borderline drinking problem and a pathology for dog collecting.

But Molly is kind, patient, her broken parts fit neatly together with his, and whilst they don’t make a whole, they make a comfortable enough shape that they don’t mind the cracks that show.

She accepts his dogs and brings with her a son, already fully-formed and mostly raised. Walter’s a good kid, and Will doesn’t have to face the burden of worry that he might inherit any of his more disturbing traits.

It’s a good life. Will is happy.

He doesn’t miss Hannibal. He reminds himself of this every day.

When things grow serious with Molly, he begins to gently close a few of the doors in his memory palace. As time passes on and, to his surprise, she sticks around, he starts to lock them too.

When they buy a house together he tears the memory of Wolf Trap apart, brick by metaphysical brick. All he leaves behind is a hand-painted signpost that reads ‘ABANDONED’, the wood already beginning to rot.

He leaves the door to Hannibal’s office in Baltimore ajar, a weakness he kind of hates himself for, but he’s done a lot worse in the grand scheme of things. On a particularly rough day after a particularly messy fight, he ignores his self-reproach and lets himself wander in. He sits in his usual chair, stares at the seat opposite and tries to compel the emptiness facing him to form itself into a shape. When the outline of a leg crossed at the knee appears, he holds a hard breath. He gets as far as a wool sock peeking from the edge of a trouser hem before his vision begins to blur and he realizes he’s crying.

He leaves the office, slams the door behind and sinks to his knees, three years of pain keening out of him as he wails for everything he’s lost, for everything he should be so much more thankful for. When he comes back to his surroundings, he is curled by the fire in the living room, a nearly empty bottle of whiskey knocked to its side and leaking its pitiful remainders.

He calls Molly and asks her to come home, and when she asks him how drunk he is he doesn’t lie.

She comes home.

He thinks of telling her the truth about his dysfunctional relationship with a serial killer. It seems like the right thing to do and she’s read the papers, everyone has. In their early days of dating she had asked a few curious but endearingly noninvasive questions. He gave her honest but monosyllabic answers and she quickly took the hint.

He settles for a compromise of half-truths, and he asks her over dinner one evening if there’s anything more she would like to know about Hannibal Lecter. When he says the name aloud for the first time in months it sounds foreign, like his mouth has rusted around the words, and he is taken aback by how it almost doesn’t hurt to say them.

Almost.

She doesn’t ask the salacious questions that have been thrown at him - by strangers in produce aisles, no less. She doesn’t inquire about Hannibal’s proclivities and whether Will shared in them. She only asks two questions, and he answers them both with as much honesty as he can.

“Were you happy when you were with him?”

He doesn’t ask her to clarify the word _with_ , they’re adults, and he knows he couldn’t define it himself if he tried.

“Yes.”

She doesn’t balk at his answer, just nods thoughtfully, chews at her lip and takes another sip of wine.

“Are you happier now without him?”

“Yes.”

A truth and a lie rolled in one, but equal parts both. Molly makes him happy, and that’s the answer they both deserve right now.

The unasked question, the one he’s immeasurably relieved she didn’t voice, rings an echo in his ears.

_Do you miss him?_

He proposes to her that night, no ring, no plan, and when she says yes they both cry.

After that he locks up the last of the doors, throws the key so far back into the recesses of his mind that he’s pretty sure even Hannibal himself would have a tough time finding it.

He leaves one room open.

He doesn’t visit it, doesn’t think about it much, and as they settle further into domesticity he almost forgets that it’s there entirely.

Almost.

A year passes. They build a life, fill it with dogs and family dinners, grilled cheese nights and board games. Will discovers he’s good at it. Even more surprising, he genuinely likes it.

He loves his family.

He loves Molly.

The ball of melancholy in his chest shrinks with each passing week. He even goes two entire days without thinking of Hannibal. He ignores the ache he feels when he realizes he went that long without him, shuts aside the notion that somehow he is being unfaithful. He focuses instead on his wedding ring, feels the weight on his hand, lets the solid mass tether and ground him.

The door still stays open.

They have their bad days. Some nights, not often, they argue. Occasionally he drinks more than he should. Some fights are worse than others, and one night Walter, in a pre-pubescent temper over something tiresome, yells “you’re not my Dad!”

Will yells back “I’m fucking glad I’m not!” and the silence that follows weighs heavy with hurt and shock. What Will meant, of course, is “I’m glad I didn’t fuck you up with any of my special brand of crazy”, but that’s not how either of them take it it. Molly spends the rest of the evening consoling her son as he tries to be brave and not cry.

Will sleeps alone that night, and behind his closed eyes he stares at the open door.

He makes it all the way to the doorway before he turns back and forces his eyes open. He rolls to his side and stares at the wall until the rising sun begins to cast shadows.

Weeks pass, undisturbed. Their harmony is simple, fulfilling in a way that keeps Will sated just enough that he doesn’t feel an itch in his belly. He is content with the knowledge that he never will be complete, not in that way, because _that way_ brings with it a brand of destruction that is only recognized by one other in his life.

He doesn’t think about being recognized.

Molly looks at him with love, Walter with something that’s close enough, and they both see him as a caregiver, a protector, someone they can trust. They see him as a kind man who shepherds their animals and fixes things when they’re broken.

They see him in the ways that matter to normal people.

They don’t _see_ him. Will does his best to forget what it was like to be seen.

When melancholy begins to take too stiff a root, he goes out on his boat, sits on the water and thinks of nothing. When his thoughts drift back to Molly he comes home. He’s never out for more than a few hours. They’re always happy to see him.

In the end, it isn’t anything remarkable that pushes him through the door. No vicious argument or particularly sharp-edged sadness that tips him over the edge.

He just misses him.

He always misses him.

And what’s one visit, he thinks, when it isn’t even an actual visit at all.

This is how he finds himself, on an afternoon like any other, walking through a door in his mind and straight into the Norman Chapel.

It is as beautiful as he remembered. Sunlight streams golden and warm, perfectly aligned to cast artful shadows that catch just so. All the chairs set out are empty, all except one.

For a while, Will just stares at the back of his head and watches him breathe. He can tell that his eyes are closed from the set of his shoulders. He seems relaxed, almost serene.

He is glad that Hannibal still has this. He never wanted him to be caged. Will just wanted to be free.

Standing at the back of a vision of that has been painstakingly recreated by two minds, Will realizes he’s never been free at all.

Not even for a second.

A metallic clink echoes jarringly in the stillness, and Will looks down to see his wedding ring bounce smartly against the floor.

Hannibal turns.

Will knows in his gut that if their eyes will meet, two years of hard work and normalcy will fall to ruin. He has two seconds to leave, three at best.

He stays for one second, because he can’t bear not to.

In that second he lets himself catch a glimpse of sharply curved cheekbone, and that, that is enough for now.

He turns away and does not look back.

-x-

Hannibal opens his eyes slowly, adjusting to the hollow wash of artificial light. He rises from his cot, stretching each limb with care and moves to his desk, setting out a pencil and a few sheets of paper. He lays them out precisely and for a moment his eyes close again.

Florentine light shines through a tangle of dark curls, tumbling soft over the nape of a pale neck. There, just there, the soft curve of his lips before his face turned away completely.

Will.

He came.

Hannibal waited, and he came.

He takes up his pencil and starts to draw.

**Author's Note:**

> This all came to be because I utterly failed at what could have been a fluffy and possibly sexy prompt. I'm sorry but also I am not.
> 
> Less tears and more fluff on my [tumblr](http://http://lovecrimevariations.tumblr.com/).


End file.
